Media are circulating reports about the detention of the former akim of Ridder, Daulet Batyrbayev, on suspicion of embezzling 200 million tenge. However, no official statements about his detention have been made yet.
If Batyrbayev is indeed suspected of corruption, we assume this could be linked to his period of service as head of the Regional Centre for Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the East Kazakhstan Region.
In April this year, after 8 months of working as akim of Ridder, Daulet Batyrbayev voluntarily left his post as head of the city, explaining his departure due to family circumstances. Before his appointment as akim, Batyrbayev was the head of the Department of Energy and Housing and Communal Services of the East Kazakhstan Region and chairman of the board of the Regional PPP Centre.
It is worth recalling that since 2018, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has provided JSC "Regional Centre for Public-Private Partnerships of the East Kazakhstan Region" with billions of tenge in loans for the implementation of a project to modernise street lighting systems in the cities and districts of the region.
Initially, around 4.8 billion tenge was allocated for the installation of streetlights as part of the project's implementation, of which 3.6 billion was a loan from the European bank, and 1.2 billion came from the regional budget. More than half of the allocated budget, namely 2.9 billion tenge, went to Oskemen.
However, to this day, the modernisation of street lighting in the East Kazakhstan Region has still not been completed. Local residents regularly express dissatisfaction with the lighting problems in the city. The Regional PPP Centre has already been fined for violating the rules on maintaining street lighting networks. Furthermore, activists have previously reported violations committed during the project's implementation.
The editorial board of FBRK is not in a position to assert that Daulet Batyrbayev is suspected of embezzling the specific funds allocated for street lighting in the East Kazakhstan Region. However, given that after 6 years the lighting has still not been properly installed, the money has clearly ended up in someone's pockets. The only question is: whose?